“How unkind you are, mamma!” she sobbed. “If I mayn’t call her my sister I shall always love her like a sister—always, always, always.”
“What is the matter with my Mildred?” asked Mr. Fausset, arriving at this moment.
“Nothing. She has only been silly,” his wife answered pettishly.
“And Fay—has she been silly, too?”
“Fay, your protégée, has been most impertinent to me. But I suppose that does not count.”
“It does count, for a good deal, if she has been intentionally impertinent,” answered Fausset gravely.
He looked back after Fay’s vanishing figure with a troubled expression. He had so sighed for peace. He had hoped that the motherless girl might be taken into his home and cared for and made happy, without evil feeling upon any one’s part; and now he could see by his wife’s countenance that the hope of union and peace was at an end.
“I don’t know what you mean about intention,” said his wife; “I only know that the girl you are so fond of has just said she hates everybody in this house except Mildred. That sound rather like intentional impertinence, I think.”
“Go and play, darling,” said Fausset to his child; “or run after Fay, and bring her back to tea.”
“You show a vast amount of consideration for your wife,” said Mrs. Fausset.